Small palm tree on the side of the waist

You will not believe what Mr Okafor has done with the planter on the eleventh floor walkway. He came up on Sunday with a bag of compost and a coconut he'd kept in his fridge since the Lagos trip, and he's got it sitting in a bucket by the bins where the wind can't get at it. Three weeks of nothing, then this morning a green spike the width of a pencil, bent over as if it's having a look at the car park. He says it has to lean toward the light or it won't go up straight. I said so does everyone on this estate, and he laughed so hard he had to sit down on the stairwell step.

The lift is out again, so I've been taking the stairs with the shopping, counting landings. Forty-one steps between each one. The grey concrete goes pale where the sun comes through the wired window on the fourth floor, and I stop there every time, because it's the only place you can see past the gasworks to a strip of sky the colour of Dad's old Bluebird tin.

Mum's postcard from Tobago is still stuck to my fridge, the one with the palms bent right over the sand. I told Mr Okafor it would look like that in twenty years if the council left it alone. He said councils never leave anything alone, which is why it'll have to lean the other way to outlast them.

I'm enclosing a photo of the sapling, though you'll only see a stick. Come up on Saturday and I'll show you how it's leaning. Bring a bag of soil and that terrible tea.

Love, Pat